Most of you out there must have witnessed at-least once in you lifetime either on tv or on the internet the experiment where a mouse is placed in a maze, with a piece of cheese on the other end of the maze and the mouse sniffs the scent of the cheese to reach its reward, that is the most suited metaphor for single player campaigns in First Person Shooter games that are available in the market namely Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 which nonetheless have recently broke records in terms of sales.
There is no arguing that graphics and the huge scale of environment is top notch and the multiplayer modes are worth playing for but for those single player fans out there they have made very little effort to bring something new to table or a game changer. The repetitive mission of going through a stage killing enemies with same A.I used in games that preceded them or games that are about five years old that take cover for a few seconds and open fire giving the player ample time to kill them. Then comes the time when your hurt you take cover to regenerate health which has come as an aspect which is followed in most of the games today. All this comes with top animation, a loosely based story-line and a team of personnel’s who you really don’t know much about. Even the reigning titles of the gaming industry Call Of Duty and Battlefield just seems to be another Michael Bay movie which lacks substance. Game developers these days are persistent to make their games more or less like an action flick sacrificing the gameplay the core reason why we gamers play games.
The record-breaking games are hesitant of giving choice to the gamers on how to finish their game and rather give the player a linear path through which the have to reach their checkpoint only to start-over the whole process again to the next checkpoint. As far as the AI is concerned the whole gaming industry is to be blamed or may be the developers think we gamers cant handle the new AI as seen in Crysis 1 which was later discontinued in Crysis 2.
Altough Battlefied which started as a multiplayer game wandered into the single player campaign territory found success but their latest attempt in the single player campaign was one of the most hideous attempt in recent gaming history. Though the game runs on a Frostbite 2 engine it did very little in terms of gampelay to be called novelty.
Single player fans are tired of the same formula put to action year after year and yet these games hit record sales either the fans have perceived that there is no going forward in terms of innovation or they have become too used to the format that they accept whatever is thrown at them from major publishers namely EA and Activision. Recent FPS blockbusters imply the cowardliness of the publishers to stay within their comfort-zone.
No matter what these games get over the top reviews, either the game reviewers fear their readership will be affected if they go against the mighty publishers, they might be considering the sales figures as a scale to measure the substance of a games or they too are stuck with the notion that this is how far an FPS game can go.
November 15th, 2011 → 8:09 am @ Vimal
0